Startling discoveries and impassioned debates have emerged from the "Chaco Phenomenon" since the publication of New Light on Chaco Canyon twenty years ago. This completely updated edition features seventeen original essays, scores of photographs, maps, and site plans, and the perspectives of archaeologists, historians, and Native American thinkers. Key topics include the rise of early great houses; the structure of agricultural life among the people of Chaco Canyon; their use of sacred geography and astronomy in organizing their spiritual cosmology; indigenous knowledge about Chaco from the perspective of Hopi, Tewa, and Navajo peoples; and the place of Chaco in the wider world of archaeology. For more than a century archaeologists and others have pursued Chaco Canyon's many and elusive meanings. In Search of Chaco brings these explorations to a new generation of enthusiasts.

Since the mid-1970s, government agencies, scholars, tribes, and private industries have attempted to navigate potential conflicts involving energy development, Chacoan archaeological study, and preservation across the San Juan Basin. The Greater Chaco Landscape examines both the imminent threat posed by energy extraction and new ways of understanding Chaco Canyon⁠ and Chaco-era great houses and associated communities from southeast Utah to west-central New Mexico in the context of landscape archaeology. Contributors analyze many different dimensions of the Chacoan landscape and present the most effective, innovative, and respectful means of studying them, focusing on the significance of thousand-year-old farming practices; connections between early great houses outside the canyon and the rise of power inside it; changes to Chaco’s roads over time as observed in aerial imagery; rock art throughout the greater Chaco area; respectful methods of examining shrines, crescents, herraduras, stone circles, cairns, and other landscape features in collaboration with Indigenous colleagues; sensory experiences of ancient Chacoans via study of the sightlines and soundscapes of several outlier communities; and current legal, technical, and administrative challenges and options concerning preservation of the landscape. An unusually innovative and timely volume that will be available both in print and online, with the online edition incorporating video chapters presented by Acoma, Diné, Zuni, and Hopi cultural experts filmed on location in Chaco Canyon, The Greater Chaco Landscape is a creative collaboration with Native voices that will be a case study for archaeologists and others working on heritage management issues across the globe. It will be of interest to archaeologists specializing in Chaco and the Southwest, interested in remote sensing and geophysical landscape-level investigations, and working on landscape preservation and phenomenological investigations such as viewscapes and soundscapes. Contributors: R. Kyle Bocinsky, G. B. Cornucopia, Timothy de Smet, Sean Field, Richard A. Friedman, Dennis Gilpin, Presley Haskie, Tristan Joe, Stephen H. Lekson, Thomas Lincoln, Michael P. Marshall, Terrance Outah, Georgiana Pongyesva, Curtis Quam, Paul F. Reed, Octavius Seowtewa, Anna Sofaer, Julian Thomas, William B. Tsosie Jr., Phillip Tuwaletstiwa, Ernest M. Vallo Jr., Carla R. Van West, Ronald Wadsworth, Robert S. Weiner, Thomas C. Windes, Denise Yazzie, Eurick Yazzie

Beautifully illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs, "Chaco Canyon" draws on the very latest research on Chaco and its environs to tell the remarkable story of the people of the canyon, from foraging bands and humble farmers to the elaborate society that flourished between the 10th and 12th centuries A.D.

Conflict, Heritage and World-Making in the Chaco documents and interprets the physical remains and afterlives of the Chaco War (1932–35) – known as South America’s first ‘modern’ armed conflict – in what is now present-day Paraguay. It focuses not only on archaeological remains as conventionally understood, but takes an ontological approach to heterogeneous assemblages of objects, texts, practices and landscapes shaped by industrial war and people’s past and present engagements with them. These assemblages could be understood to constitute a ‘dark heritage’, the debris of a failed modernity. Yet it is clear that they are not simply dead memorials to this bloody war, but have been, and continue to be active in making, unmaking and remaking worlds – both for the participants and spectators of the war itself, as well as those who continue to occupy and live amongst the vast accretions of war matériel which persist in the present.

The first complete account of Chacoan archaeology, from the discovery of the ruins by Spanish soldiers in the seventeenth century, through the scientific analyses of the 1970s.

The site of a great Ancestral Pueblo center in the 11th and 12th centuries AD, the ruins in Chaco Canyon look like a city to some archaeologists, a ceremonial center to others. Chaco and the people who created its monumental great houses, extensive roads, and network of outlying settlements remain an enigma in American archaeology. Two decades after the latest and largest program of field research at Chaco (the National Park Service's Chaco Project from 1971 to 1982) the original researchers and other leading Chaco scholars convened to evaluate what they now know about Chaco in light of new theories and new data. Those meetings culminated in an advanced seminar at the School of American Research, where the Chaco Project itself was born in 1968. In this capstone volume, the contributors address central archaeological themes, including environment, organization of production, architecture, regional issues, and society and polity. They place Chaco in its time and in its region, considering what came before and after its heyday and its neighbors to the north and south, including Mesoamerica.